He speared her with a look. “Don’t call yourself such.”
“Fine. Hawkins’s mistress.”
The words set him further on edge. “Were you? His mistress?”
She met his gaze. “Does it matter?”
Only that he did not honor you. Only that he did not deserve you.
“Someone will marry you. Make your list. I’ll ensure it.”
“Alec,” she said, and the tone was one a mother might use with a child to explain why he couldn’t make clotted cream from clouds. “Hawkins was covered in bruises. You are covered in blood. If anyone in the world were willing to overlook the initial scandal, this has made it worse.”
He looked out the window. “That won’t keep you from marrying.”
She laughed, the sound without humor. “I haven’t spent much time in Society, Your Grace. But I assure you, it will.”
“Then we double the dowry. Triple it.”
She sighed his name in the darkness, and he heard the resignation in the word. Loathed it. “I wanted to marry,” she said, and he stilled, keenly interested in the truth in the words. “I wanted the promise of family and future. And yes, of love. But if I must settle . . .” She trailed off, then returned to the idea, with more conviction. “Alec, I don’t wish to settle.”
Finally something that they could agree upon. “I won’t have you settle. I would never ask you to.”
That little laugh came again, so full of disbelief that he found it difficult to listen to. “That’s precisely what you’re asking me to do.” She paused. “Eight days is not enough for a man on that list to not be settling. Eight days is not enough for love.”
“Dammit, Lillian, how does this end?” Her head snapped back as though he’d hit her, and perhaps he had, with frustration and anger. “Let’s say I give you the funds and you run. Where do you go?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Again. And finally, “Away.”
He did not want her away.
“Where?”
A pause. Then, “What is Scotland to you?”
“Lillian . . .” he began.
She shook her head. “No. Honestly. Why do you prefer it?”
He shrugged. “It is home.”
“And what does that mean?” she prodded.
“It is—” Safe. “Comfortable.”
“Unlike here.”
The difference between Scotland, wild and welcoming, and London, with its rules and its propriety, was so vast it made him laugh. “It is everything here is not. It is entirely different.”
She nodded. “And that is what I want. I want away from here. From this world. Why should you have it and not me?”
He wanted to give it to her. Wanted her to know the feeling of standing in a field of heather as the skies opened and rain washed away worry.
But even Scotland could not disappear the past.
“You think this world would not find you? You think you could live as a wealthy widow somewhere? Head to Paris and reign a silken queen? Travel to America and use the money to build an empire? You cannot. This world will return to haunt you. That is what happens to—”
She waited. “To whom?”
“To those who run.”
He’d run, had he not? He’d vowed never to let them remind him of the past.
And look at tonight.
Look at his tattered clothes, his bloodstained hands.
He would never outrun it.
But if she found a husband, she might survive it.
She would survive it.
“You stay. Meet the men. See what comes.”
She threw up her hands in frustration. “Lord deliver me from meddling guardians. Fine.”
Silence fell, and Alec found himself at once grateful and exceedingly unsettled by it. Luckily, it did not last long.
“I told you the coat didn’t fit.”
He slid his gaze to hers. “What did you say?”
“Your coat. You’ve split it to shreds. Your trousers, too. You look as though you stepped out of the wilderness and right into the ballroom.”
“To be expected from the Scottish Brute,” he said.
“No,” she said instantly, surprising him. “Not brutish.”
It was a lie. He was covered in blood and his clothes were falling from his body. If he’d ever looked the part of a brute, now was it. “How do I look, then?”
She cut him a look. “Are you searching for a compliment, Duke?”
“Just the truth.”
She lifted one shoulder and let it fall in an affect he was coming to rather like. Not that he should like this woman. She was too beautiful to be anything but dangerous. “Big.”
God knew that was true. “Too big.”
“For the coat and trousers, yes,” she said, “but not too big.”
“The rest of England might disagree.”
“I am not the rest of England.” She stopped, considering her next words, and added. “I rather like how big you are.”
The words sent a thrill through him. She didn’t mean it to come out the way it sounded. It was the darkness of the night and the motion of the carriage and the enclosed space.
And it did not matter if he wanted her to say it again and again. Lillian Hargrove was not for wanting.
Now, if only his body would listen.
“I assure you, the rest of England disagrees,” he said, shifting on the seat, wondering how much further they had to go.
She smirked. “Not your countess.”
Peg. He feigned ignorance. “My countess?”
“Lady Rowley. She doesn’t think you are too big.”
Peg didn’t think that now. Not when he stood before her, the Duke of Warnick, with a higher station than she’d found for herself. But once . . . Peg had valued him much, much less. Even as he’d wanted nothing more than to belong to her.
Alec looked out the window. “She’s Lord Rowley’s countess, don’t you think?”
“I don’t, actually,” Lily said. “I saw the way she touched at you. Like she owned you. And the way you looked at her. As though . . .” She trailed off.
He told himself not to speak. Not to ask. But somewhere in the silence between them, there was something he wanted quite desperately to understand. “As though?”
She shook her head and looked out the window. “As though you wanted to be owned.”
He had wanted it. From the first moment she’d smiled at him when he was a boy, showing him what desire was. Before he’d known what she would make him. What he would make himself for her. He’d have done anything she asked. And he had. He’d trailed after her like a lovesick pup.
Until she’d made it all clear.
Sweet Alec, girls like me don’t marry boys like you.
But he wasn’t about to tell Lillian Hargrove any of that.
“Peg is not my countess.”
“But you were Peg’s,” Lily said, her silly frock turning her into a dog with a bone.
He sighed, looking out the window of the carriage for a time. “Ages ago. She was sister to a schoolmate.”
“And you weren’t a duke.”
He gave a little huff of laughter at that. “No. If I had been . . .” It was his turn to trail off.
“If you had been?” Lily prompted, and he looked to her, finding her gaze locked on his, waiting. She was still and straight, as though she could wait forever for an answer. She wasn’t getting it.
He shook his head.
“You wanted her?”
Like nothing he’d ever wanted before. He’d wanted all the things she’d represented. All the pretty promises she’d never given.
He’d wanted it all. Like a fool.
Lily did not move for a long while, and Alec refused to ask what she was thinking, instead saying, “So, you see, Lillian, I know what it is not to get the match you wanted.”
She nodded. “It seems so.”
Silence fell between them, and Alec became more and more aware of her in the darkness, o
f her long legs beneath the silk skirts of her dress, of her graceful hands, wrapped in kidskin, clasped together in her lap.
Those hands began to consume him. He watched them, wishing they were not gloved. Wishing he could see them, bare. Wishing he could touch them.
Wishing they could touch him.
He sat straight at that. She was not for touching.
And he was not for her to touch.
He looked out the window again. How far could they possibly be from the damn dog house? Not close enough, clearly.
And then she said, softly, “I thought he loved me.”
The sentence undid him, flooding him with jealousy and fury and a keen desire to stop the carriage, find Hawkins, and finish what he had started earlier. He flexed his right hand, the welcome sting of his knuckles reminding him that he’d done good damage, but not enough.
“Did you love him?” He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth. The answer wasn’t for him to know.
And then she answered, slowly destroying him with every word. “My mother died when I was a child. My father never remarried, and when he died, I went to live with the duke. He was kind enough. He settled me. Provided me with rooms and a more than generous allowance.” She hesitated, searching for the right words. “He took great pains to be a good guardian. He intended to give me a season, you know. Before he died. But he wasn’t a substitute for a family.”
“And the staff?” he asked, remembering how little they knew of her.
She smiled, small and sad in the moonlight. “They don’t know how to interact with me. I’m neither fish nor fowl. Not an aristocrat. Not a servant. Not family. Not entirely guest. Untouchable. Doubly so, somehow.” She paused, wrapping her arms around herself, as though to ward off a chill. Looked away. “I would go months without being touched by another person, beyond a maid helping to button a dress, a gloved hand taking mine to help me into a carriage.”
His gaze fell to her hands again, and he loathed the gloves anew. “Your room. Under the stairs.”
She lifted one shoulder in that shrug again. “It was nice to hear people. Up and down the stairs. At least I was reminded that there were others in the world. At least I was close to them, physically. Even if I didn’t have them in my life.
“I would hear them laugh . . . the girls. They would giggle all the way down the stairs about some silly thing I never knew of. And I would have given anything to trade places with them. To be with them. Instead of where I was—in between worlds.”
“Lily,” he said, his chest aching with desire to erase all that time alone.
She’d never be alone again. He’d make sure of it.
“I would wonder sometimes—if I’d ever touch another person again. If I’d ever be loved.” Looked back to Alec, the truth in her eyes. “He made me feel loved.”
The words wrecked him, at once making him want to gather her close and set her far away. And then crush Hawkins into dust for taking advantage of Lily. “And you? Did you love him?”
She looked away again. “Who can say?”
Alec hated the words. The way they did not deny her feelings. He could say. He wanted to put the words in her mouth. The categorical denial. Instead, he said, “He did not deserve you.”
One side of her lovely lips rose. “You have a terribly high opinion of me, Your Grace. The rest of the world would say it was I who did not deserve him.”
“The rest of the world can hang.”
She raised a hand to the glass in the carriage window. Dragged a finger through the condensation there. “I did it, though,” she said, softly, lost in memory.
“Why?” He couldn’t resist the question.
“A tempting promise. Sometimes . . .” He wondered if she would finish, and she was silent long enough that he thought she wouldn’t. And then, “Sometimes, you wait for so long, that it all feels like love.”
His chest was suddenly, devastatingly tight. What was she doing to him?
He leaned forward, closing the distance between them and whispering, “I don’t wish to hurt you.”
“I know that.”
“I should never have come.” Nothing good ever came from being in London. Especially not when London came with this beautiful woman, who threw everything into chaos.
“There’s something rather noble about you coming. For me.”
Perhaps it was the way she said it that made it sound nearly magical, as though she’d stood naked beneath the stars like some pagan goddess and conjured him there. Perhaps it was the darkness, the wash of silver moonlight on her porcelain skin that made him reach for her hands even as he knew shouldn’t. Knew it was a mistake of the highest possible caliber.
Lily relinquished her hand without hesitation, and he turned it, palm up, revealing a little quartet of buttons on the inside of her wrist. Slowly, he unbuttoned the glove and, tugging on the fingers, slid it from her hand, revealing her smooth, bare skin.
At first, he simply stared at it, feeling as though he existed on a precipice, looking down into a deep abyss from which he would not return. Lily’s breath was coming in a quick, staccato rhythm—or perhaps that was his own, filled with desire to touch her.
I wondered if I would ever touch another person again.
The memory of the words whispered around them, and in their silent echo, Alec lifted his own hand to his mouth, pulling at the fingers of his glove with his teeth, removing it with efficiency, before tossing it aside and—before he could regret it—sliding his bare palm over hers.
Her breath caught at the touch, at the slide of their fingers, at the way he captured her small hand in his much larger one.
Her skin was so soft, like silk. Like the sound of the little sigh that came on a lovely exhale. He did not look up at the sound. Refused to, because he knew that if he did, he would not be able to stop himself from what came next.
Instead, he stroked her hand, his palm running over hers, his fingers tracing the dips and valleys of her fingers, until only their fingertips touched, before he once again took her hand, lacing their fingers together tightly.
“Palm to palm,” she whispered, and he heard the barely-there teasing in the words. The reference to their earlier discussion of Romeo and Juliet.
He should let her go. He meant to.
He didn’t mean to say, “The only part of the play that’s worth anything.”
He didn’t mean to look at her, to find her too close and still infernally far away. He willed himself to move. To sit back. To release her.
And then she whispered, “Let lips do as hands do.”
“Fucking Shakespeare,” he cursed, tightening his grip and pulling her to him, his other hand, still gloved, capturing her, sliding over her jaw, his long fingers curving around her neck and into her hair, scattering pins as he set his lips to hers and kissed her like he was starving and she was a banquet.
She tasted like sin and sex and . . . He didn’t know how it was possible, but she tasted like Scotland, wild and free and welcoming.
He stopped, pulling away just enough to put a hairsbreadth of space between them, and closed his eyes. He should stop. This wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t possible.
She tasted like home.
Just one more kiss. One more taste. Quickly. Just enough to tide him over until he could get back and breathe again.
“Alec?” she whispered, and the question in his name was his undoing. Not protest. Not confusion.
Desire.
He knew, because he felt it, too.
Alec groaned and pulled her closer, releasing her bare hand and hauling her across the carriage and onto his lap, where he could get a better taste. He put one arm around her, protecting her should the carriage hit a rut and send her flying, and he returned to her lips, playing over them gently, softly, teasing her with his tongue until she gasped at the sensation and he took full advantage, tasting her silken heat with long, luxurious promise.
She groaned, unexpected and unfiltered, and he went hard a
s iron beneath her, wanting that sound again and again—that proof of her pleasure. Of her passion.
Her fingers slid into his hair, then, and she held him close, meeting his tongue with hers, matching him with a kiss that threatened to send them both up in flames, along with the carriage.
He growled his pleasure and captured her face between both hands, holding her still as he kissed her, stealing her sighs like a thief.
And he was a thief. Taking without hesitation.
Or perhaps it was she who was the thief.
They stole together.
Marauded together.
Pillaged together.
And it was the most glorious thing he’d ever experienced. Her hands slid inside his shredded jacket as she moved against him, and he lifted her skirts, sliding his hands up her silk-clad thighs, lifting her again, setting her down astride him, scandalous and secret and everything he’d ever wanted.
The carriage bounced again, and she clutched his sides, gasping against his lips at the movement. “Alec,” she whispered. “Please.” No. She didn’t whisper. She begged. And how was he to deny her, especially when she lowered herself to his lap. To him.
He was wickedly hard, too-tight trousers suddenly, brutally uncomfortable.
He groaned her name, stealing her lips again as he pulled her closer, until he could feel the heat of her through his trousers and her pantaloons, and one of her hands slid up, over his chest and shoulders and into his hair again, pulling him close as her tongue met his again and again, and he ached for more of her.
Her free hand clutched one arm, moving it, directing it, sliding it up her bodice to the place where silk met beautiful, pristine skin. “Touch me,” she sighed. “Please.”
He had to stop. They had to stop. He lifted his lips, gasping for breath. “Lily. We mustn’t.”
She opened her eyes, desire warring with something far more complicated in them. He could feel her heart racing beneath his fingers, where she held his hand to her, where she burned him with her beauty. “Please, Alec,” she said, soft as silk. “Please want me.”
She made it sound like it was a choice. As though he did not ache for every inch of her. As though he did not wish to claim her in the most primal way possible and erase the memory of every man she had ever desired.